Want to boost your stock of plants for free? Now is the perfect time to take cuttings
If you have favourite shrubs in the garden and you’d like to have more of them, then now is a good time to propagate them with cuttings. Cuttings can be taken at any time of the year, but they need to be treated differently depending on whether the host plant is dormant or in active growth.
Cuttings taken in late summer and early autumn are known as semi-ripe cuttings because stems are starting to harden up at this time of the year but the tips may still be soft.
To take cuttings, choose healthy stems and then shorten these to about 15cm and remove the leaves from the bottom 5cm.
Using a dibber – a pencil will do – make a hole into a container filled with a mix of peat-free potting compost and sand and inserts the cutting 4cm.
Add more cuttings, keeping them all about 10cm apart, then water the pot and place it in a cold frame or greenhouse, putting it under the bench to keep it in the shade.
Make sure the soil doesn’t dry out, but don’t overwater it either as this could cause rot. And during the winter keep it barely damp.
Once growth starts in spring, apply a routine liquid feed and wait until the leaves have dropped in autumn before putting up the young plants individually.
Many plants can be propagated in this way, including evergreens, but there are some plants, such as azaleas, which respond better to layering.
You can do this either by wounding the bark on the lower side of a low-growing stem and pegging this down into the soil until roots emerge or, for stems higher up in the plant, make a cut halfway through the stem, wrap it in damp moss and then seal this with polythene.
It will take about a year for a strong cutting to form, but once it has just sever it completely from the plant and grow on in the usual way.
Cuttings are an easy way to increase your stock of plants and, while there may be losses along the way, and you do need a bit of patience, it is fun to see what you can grow for free.